Chamber and committees

The goal is wider than that. It speaks to culture and population as well as education. It is about enabling the widest coverage possible while connecting that with building communities, supporting areas of low Gaelic population and reversing historical declines. We absolutely want to see the expansion of Gaelic in the education system, but our aim goes beyond that.

Recent statistics demonstrate that progress is being made. We have greater provision at primary level than at secondary level, and I would like to see that start to balance out. You are right to say that recruitment is a significant part of that.

My colleague Douglas Ansdell will be able to say more, but legislation recognises Gaelic and Scots, alongside English, as official languages of Scotland. Our legislation gives parents a right to request that their local authority provide Gaelic-medium education. There are challenges in implementing that, such as ensuring that there are enough teaching staff, but that is definitely our direction of travel. Progress is being made, although I would like it to happen more quickly.

Would you like to add anything, Douglas?

It is definitely not slipping between portfolios. I will say this as often as I possibly can; although Gaelic is part of my title, you will hear me talking about Gaelic, Scots and BSL as languages that I take responsibility for supporting, and I will do that more, to demonstrate that parity.

BSL provision in education is another barrier that we need to pull down to ensure that we provide an excellent education for all our young people. You talked about how the provision of BSL is framed as a training issue rather than a language access issue. I will consider that point, because I do not want that to be the case. If we talk about the provision of training and specialist training, that is because that is the practical way of addressing the language access issues that we want to address.

As you will know from our manifesto, and as you will have seen in the programme for government, we talk about wanting to improve the educational outcomes for BSL users. I will take the committee’s view on this, but we believe that an improved pool of specialist deafblind teachers who can be in our schools, utilising BSL and working with young people who require it, should be available. I am focusing on that, because I feel that that is a practical barrier that needs to be overcome, and we are doing scoping work on what exactly we need to do in that respect. However, I will take views from folks on other things that we should be focusing on, too.

Thank you for asking what, to me, is a really big and important question. I will touch on a few areas in response.

First of all, as a result of our greater understanding of children’s experiences and of neurodiversity in general, we are seeing a growth in the number of young people who require additional support to ensure that those barriers are removed and that they have an excellent education. I would say, with humility, that our funding is seeking to keep up with that, but the growth is such that there is more work to be done. Of course, the situation is not unique to Scotland—it is happening across the world.

An additional £29 million has been provided in this budget, £28 million of which was for councils and investment there, but we used £1 million to develop specialist training and progression for the teaching workforce. As the teachers in the room will know, every teacher will undergo ASN training in their initial teacher training. We are now looking to bolster that with, in essence, additional continuing professional development to support the workforce.

We also need more additional support teachers in our schools. I am really keen to work on that and on teacher workforce planning. In my statement, I talked about the fact that, quite bluntly, we have a cohort of qualified primary school teachers who are suffering underemployment, and I do not have nearly enough additional support needs teachers in our secondary schools. I want to work on progression for those individuals who choose to do that training—I stress that that should be a choice.

On the national staged intervention model, many councils are using the staged process anyway, but the model is about consistency, intervention as early as possible in a child’s life, and parents having an expectation of what is going to happen and how their young person or child will be supported through the process. It is also a case of trying to take some of the complexity out of the system and making the experience better for children and young people.

Therefore, the issues are funding, better professional development, working to provide more teachers to support additional support for learning in our classrooms, and trying to take a really well-informed and national approach to walking with our young people on their journey. All of that is underpinned by an education principle that you should not need diagnosis in order to get support, although, for example, a diagnosis is required for medication for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. However, educationally, we should be working to support our young people in advance of, or without, a diagnosis.

I will be brief. The Government commissions reviews, but ministers make decisions about what is implemented according to our priorities, so there is no saying that, when we commission a review, we will implement its recommendations in full. We choose the areas that we believe will best serve the people of Scotland.

As to whether this will be a parliamentary session for reform, I absolutely intend to be a reforming education secretary. We have talked about the curriculum improvement cycle, reduced class contact time and changes to our workforce. I would say that removing mobile phones from the learning environment definitively also constitutes a significant reform from the past five years. In those ways and more, I am looking to reform.

In the interest of time, I will say only that I take those insights on board and that we will consider funding as part of the scoping work that I mentioned to the convener in order to support our intended expansion of BSL provision.

To a large extent, much of what is in our programme for government across the very broad spectrum of outcomes that this portfolio covers—from before a child is born to their education and right through life—builds on successes to date. There will be continuity—for example, in education, I set out last week that I was determined to continue the Scottish attainment challenge as a key driver of the continued shrinking of the poverty-related attainment gap.

We are building on policies such as the roll-out of free school meals and all the work that has been done to reduce the cost of the school day. The Promise and our work in child protection are very much a continuation of work that was done in previous parliamentary sessions. However, there are also departures from what has been done, and we will undertake significant bits of reform that will be unique to this period. The delivery of the curriculum improvement cycle—the development of the new curriculum and its successful implementation, which I view as of equal importance—will be new to this parliamentary session. We will also roll out significant changes in childcare, moving from the delivery of the 1,140 hours to something that looks very different, is available 52 weeks a year and goes from the age of nine months to primary 7.

I am happy to get into any of the specific areas. There is continuity and there are continuing approaches but, equally, there are some big stand-alone areas. I should also say that public service reform in general in education will be new and substantial in this parliamentary session.

Over the past 10 years, the Scottish attainment challenge has seen about £1.75 billion of investment. About £1 billion of that has been in pupil equity funding—the PEF—which goes straight to school leaders to decide how best to address the poverty-related attainment gap in their schools. We can discuss that, but I think that that has been one of the breakthrough differences in approach in Scottish education in the past 10 years. It brings the question of what Ms Gibson asked about right to the fore and says that we all have a responsibility to tackle that. Another part of the £1.75 billion supports care-experienced young people directly and goes through councils.

I said in my statement last week that I remain committed to the model of the Scottish attainment challenge and to its continuing. I am looking carefully at the balance between what goes straight to schools and what goes to local authorities, but I am committed to the idea that it is for school leaders to decide what it is best to do in their schools. That might be supporting care-experienced young people or, if there are particular problems with attendance, really leaning into that and working out what is going on in families. There is a range of things that can be done, but the beauty of it is that it is up to the school leader.

That is what we are working on just now. COSLA is the delivery partner, but we are investing £15 million this year in enhanced provision and £44 million a year thereafter. I have been clear with COSLA that the commitment is to an offer in every primary school, but I understand that flexibilities will be required with regard to, say, rurality. Were you going to come on to that?

I can answer specifically about PISA. From my perspective, it is just one way of measuring one strand of success in an education system. It is important, and I will take it into account, as I do all the ways in which we measure success, including ACEL data, exam results, positive destinations, the number of young people going to university and the widening access work that we do with universities. There are many ways of measuring success, and I do not put one above the other.

I believe that our education system should be capable of driving academic excellence as well as supporting strength in vocational excellence and readiness for the world and the world of work. PISA looks particularly at reading, mathematics and science, which are very important in our system. However, Scotland’s curriculum for excellence also looks at artistic expression, problem solving and moral education. Frankly, I would not have one without the other. I want to draw on the evidence that we have to ensure that our education system is capable of providing academic excellence, as certain bodies will encourage us to do, as well as producing well-rounded individuals who are ready for the world and are capable of being resilient. PISA is just one factor.

It is quite hard to boil down a child’s whole offer academically, vocationally and extra-curricularly—if that is a word—into one presentation of facts about them. I know that there are recommendations about the certificate of achievement.

There is much in the Hayward review that I support, and we already have a system that does not unnecessarily require final examination in areas where it is clearly not required—in technical subjects, home economics and others. However, to be absolutely clear, I still support final examination in a range of areas not only as a means of doing what I think you are challenging me to do, which is to help our young people to demonstrate their capacity, but because many young people will go on to do things in life that require them to perform under pressure in that way. That is why I support having a mix of assessment.

As I say, it is hard to distil a child’s ability down to one measure, but I will continue to use achievement of curriculum for excellence levels data, which is teacher led. We will use our national exam results, which this year showed, for the second year running, increased academic attainment across the board; we will use vocational awards, which have shown a quite remarkable increase—they have gone up by 121 per cent since 2019—and we will record what our young people are doing after school.

A senior officer in an education authority recently said to me, “Our positive destination levels are now so high that I could chap the doors of the young people who I know are not currently in education, training or work.” That is a really successful position. We will keep working on all those issues, but the approach is different for different young people.